One of the first things he decided to be was the postman.
He'd always wanted to be a postman from those days
at the orphans home.
When there was no one to write to him
through the long lonely days in this furnished room.
From his high, single, dusty window,
how many times he had watched his face
pressed like a moon against the glass or the screen?
The Postman coming up the sidewalk.
Shifting the weight of the heavy mysterious leather
bag on his shoulder, bundled against cold or sweating
on hot summer days.
Bearing always in that miraculous
grab bag, the prizes, the sealed news and secret messages
of other worlds.
How quirk envied that burden.
The young postman bore a load of pleas, rejections,
recriminations, passions, and deep desires.
He brought bills and ads, and news
of birth and death, love and death lay lightly in his hands.
The transformation was simple and on the whole successful,
yet it disturbed him deeply.
Here, we cut for a minute to his journal,
and I might explain one thing.
I don't know what's coming up, to tell you the truth,
but I haven't read this in a while.
All the dirty words to coin a title.
Of all the dirty words they appear, I decided,
since Miss Eudora Welty and my mother both once reprimanded me
for in the southern phrase too much ugly
talk that I would not prohibit the characters from talking
ugly.
But I would use variations on this
such as bleak, black, blah, and so forth.
So, if we come to some of those, I'm
not centering the narrator of this story,
or the characters have already censored it out.
But they were just as offended there because they said, well,
we know what you meant.
Here he is.
How little I know of the people around me?
He wrote in his journal.
Who would have dreamed that young bridges is a drunk?
All this time I thought he was ill.
And take Mrs. Kinase, the widower Kinase,
whom I have long admired for her impeccable taste,
fastidious manners, and her rare, rare,
in this section of town, appearance, cool, smiling,
and elegant.
She's always seemed like one bright flower of beauty
in this crummy neighborhood.
And yet, while I was being the postman,
she offered herself to me in payment of 8 cents postage due.
First, she said they had the money up in her apartment,
and would I mind coming upstairs to get it with her?
I followed her up the stairs cheerfully.
Once inside the door, she turned and told me
she didn't have a red cent to pay me, and I can believe it.
The apartment of the widow Kinase is bare and empty.
No furniture of any kind at all, except for one
old ripped mattress in the middle of the floor.
No objects of any kind, no chairs, no rugs, no curtains,
nothing.
Except that all the closets are open, bulging and overflowing
with clothing.
The closets glittering and glowing like open jewel boxes
over brimming with an abundance of extravagant beautiful
clothes.
What a thing to live like a poor rat,
to live almost as poor as poor old job in order to walk cool
and smiling and elegant on the streets in her fine clothes.
And so, even curiosity and disillusion,
I must ask myself, what is the truth about Mrs. Kinase?
What is the truth for her?
Is it to strip to the skin hurriedly and lie down
on a mattress in the middle of the floor
to plead with a young postman to accept the gift of herself
in lieu of 8 cents postage due?
Why?
In the vain hope, does that sealed envelope
may contain some answer, some shattering marvel of news,
some ultimate and undeniable revelation which
will change her face and the face of this old world,
or at least wipe away the lines of her face
and the cruel print of crow's feet
at the edges of her bright eyes?
Later, the real postman coming along his daily route
was somewhat astonished to discover
that someone, or other apparently himself,
had already delivered the mail in this neighborhood.
Now, this was a test for Quirk.
Anxiously watched from the window of his room
when the real postman appeared on the scene.
He watched him chat amiably with some people on the sidewalk,
and then shrugged his shoulders and go away briskly,
whistling a happy tune as if what had happened
were the most ordinary occurrence in the world.
Off went the postman with a shrug and a whistle,
and not even the burden of suspicion.
And so Jacob Quirk concluded that people most of the time
were devoid of the itch of curiosity.
And that most of them, in fact, live continually
in a senseless, irrational, mysterious, and magical world.
A world in which even the most remote and isolated
of Aborigines, clad only in war paint and loincloths,
would find frighteningly primitive.
Quirk imagined that he could come galloping down the street,
riding on a noble steed, clad in a suit of armor,
a St. George outlooking for a dragon.
And just so long as he didn't run a red light,
go up a one way street in the wrong direction.
Begin to tilt and joust with taxicabs and trucks.
He would not likely raise a single eyebrow
among the crowd of those passing by.
So wholly engrossed were they in their own woes and concerns.
He decided that people see what they want to see,
and believe what they care to believe.
And this, in itself, he ascertained
was at once the strength and secret of his art.
This knowledge gave him an intoxicating, dizzying sense
of his own freedom.